Schulmaffs book is not the first ro make a case for the decade. John Updike (no friend of the nineteen-sixties) im- plicitly advanced the same argument, al- most ten years ago, in his novel "Memo- ries of the Ford Administration." And the journalist David Frum published a lively booklast year,"HowWe Got Here: The 70s: The Decade That Brought You to say about this line of complaint is that it is so beautifiy and unreconstructedly seventies. Seventies people want a decade because sixes people have one. No news there. And what does their decade mm out to be? A reader of either Schulman's book or Fmm's will come to the same con- clusion, one that was reached by most six- ties people long ago: that the seventies where in there you can hear the gears shin- ing. Schulman's view is that the nineteen- seventies was a period of increasing in- dMdualism (Frum agrees), loss of trust in big government and other institutions (Frum says the same), privatization, and the "Southernization" of American life, by which he means both the spread of white, working-class Southern tastes Modern Life--For Better or Worse" (Basic; $16) in which he made the same claim that Schulman makesthat it was the nineteen-seventies, not the nineteen- sixties, that changed American life ("the most total social transformation that the United States has lived through since the coming of industrialism," as Frum put it). Frum, too, thought that the main reason the nineteen-seventies were underappre- ciated was the propaganda of sixties peo- ple. But he was pretty sure that the world was ready to wise up and move on. "The millions of Americans born since 1970," he explained (he is a somewhat more pungent writer than Schulman), "seem to have collectively decided that the Boomers are absolutely the most boring generation of old-fogies ever to have in- flicted their reminiscences on the young." The first thing it m-ikes a sixes person were basically ten years of sixties afteref- fects. A great wave rolled up on the beach, depositing, high on the shoreline, Jackie Kennedy, the "I Have a Dream" speech, Motown, the miniskirt, Joe Namath, "Blonde on Blonde," "Portnoy's Com- plaint," and the Head Start program. Then it drew back, leaving behind Evel Knievel, Werner Erhard (nd Jack Rosen- berg), Bobby Riggs, "Frampton Comes Alive!,"'Jonathan Livingston Seagull," the "malaise" speech, the zipless luck, and a handful of Whip lnflation Now buttons. It is hard to see how the second batch of detritus belongs to a "social transforma- tion" greater and more profound than the first. But that seems to be the argument. To their credit, Frum and Schulman make no particular aesthetic claims for their decade; Schtdrnan calls it "gaudy, depressing." They just think that some- across the country and the growing polit- ical power of the Sun Belt states. All this could be summed up by saying that dur- ing the nineteen-seventies what used to be called Eastern-establishment liberal- ism finally bit the dust. This seems a rather negative way to define a decade, but it's a fair assertion. The question is: why? Frum's idea is that the nineteen- seventies can be understood as "the re- bellion of an unmilitary people against institutions and laws formed by a cen- tury of war and the preparation for war." Americans got tired of restraining them- selves in the name of the national good, and after Viemam and other disruptions they could no longer see a W reason for continuing to do so. He thinks that this explains why self-centeredness was the leading personality trait of the period why Tom Wolfe was right to call the THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2OOI 129